Summary: Accepting a narrow definition of resistance as 'active
participation in an organised attempt to undermine the Third Reich' three types of
resisters are identified: those who became disillusioned with the Third Reich, those who
acted out of necessity and those who resisted because of political, religious or moral
principles.

Different Definitions of Resistance

'RESISTANCE' HAS BEEN DEFINED in different ways. Hans-Adolf Jacobsen says:

... [it] must comprise all that was done despite the terror of the Third Reich, despite
the suffering and martyrdom, for the sake of humanity, for the aid of the persecuted. And
the word resistance in some cases applies, too, to certain forms of standing aside in
silence.1

This is a very wide definition indeed. It implies that a German resisted Hitler if, for
example, (s)he continued to buy from a Jewish shop despite a boycott organised by the Nazi
Party or if (s)he gave pieces of bread to one of the millions of starving forced workers
brought to Germany from eastern Europe during the Second World War. It could even include
failure to join a Nazi organisation.

Obviously a variety of courses of action were open to a German who was opposed to the
Third Reich and who wanted to do something about it: but how many of them really amounted
to 'resistance'? Ian Kershaw has warned against applying the concept too broadly. Trying
to be more precise than Jacobsen, he has distinguished 'dissent' (the spontaneous voicing
of anti-Nazi opinions) and 'opposition' (actions only directed against limited
characteristics of the Hitler state) from 'resistance'. The latter he defines as the
'active participation in organized attempts to work against the regime with the conscious
aim of undermining it or planning for the moment of its demise'.2 According to this view,
resistance was about action not words, organisation and planning not spontaneity, the
rejection of everything Hitler stood for not just part of it. Resistance was nothing less
than a meaningful contribution to the destruction of the Third Reich.

Kershaw's criteria are very exacting indeed. After all, how many ordinary Germans could
ever have hoped to destroy a whole modern state system? But still his definition helps
remind us that while no small number of Germans at some time or other made signs of
defiance towards the Third Reich as they went about their daily round, others were filled
with such a passionate desire to oppose Hitler that resistance became the whole purpose of
their lives. This essay will deal with some of Germany's more passionate resisters. Who
were they, and how did their stories compare?

Resistance Through Disillusionment

The decision for a German to become a true resister often was neither easy nor
straightforward. This is shown clearly in the cases of a number of teenagers. From 1934
on, reports compiled by the police in the Ruhr and Rhineland described the existence of
groups of largely working-class youths who dressed distinctively (often in cheescloth
shirts and leather shorts), who went on outings together and who were 'at daggers drawn'
with the Hitler Youth (Hitler Jugend). These groups were called Kittelbach Pirates,
Navajos and, most famously, Edelweiss Pirates. According to historian A. Kenkmann, most of
the teenagers involved here originally had been happy to join the Hitler Jugend.3
They only became Pirates when the Hitler Jugend proved unable to meet their needs.
Often there were very personal reasons for this. For instance, some teenagers had had
arguments with Hitler Jugend leaders, others had been refused promotion within the
organisation, others again belonged to families which could not afford the necessary Nazi
uniforms.

The example of Hans Steinbrück is particularly interesting. He was a member of an
Edelweiss Pirate group during the Second World War, and as a result was hanged in November
1944. Originally, however, he had been a leader in the Hitler Jugend and in due course
tried to join the secret political police in Düsseldorf. Stupidly he started passing
himself off as a secret policeman before his application had been approved and as a result
he was not only rejected, but put in prison for a short while. Only after his release did
Hans begin a career of resistance to the Third Reich. It culminated in him leading attacks
by armed gangs on government buildings in war-torn Cologne. In other words, Hans only
rejected the Hitler state after it had first rejected him.

Rather more famous resisters also started out in league with National Socialism. Claus
von Stauffenberg was the army officer who planted the bomb which nearly blew up Adolf
Hitler on 20 July 1944. This member of the Schwabian nobility had enjoyed a very
conservative upbringing. In an essay written at school, he identified only one profession
as really honourable: fighting for your nation. Not surprisingly he joined the army and by
1930 had made up his mind that Hitler's political movement was the best hope for Germany.
He participated in the campaign against Poland in 1939 and wrote home as follows: 'The
population is an unbelievable rabble; there are a lotof Jews and a lot of cross-breeds.'4
When military men who were already trying to resist Hitler contacted von Stauffenberg in
1942, he refused to co-operate with them. For a very long time this man was widely in
agreement with National Socialist values and loyal to the Third Reich.

Gradually, however, he was compelled to re-think. Von Stauffenberg was horrified by the
war-time carnage he saw in Russia. He was outraged by the barbaric way German troops were
ordered to treated Slavic civilians. At a conference in Vinnitsa in October 1942, he said
it was scandalous that no senior military man would take a stand against the way Hitler
was leading the war. His disillusionment deepened in January 1943 when the Sixth Army
surrendered to the Russians at Stalingrad. From that time on, von Stauffenberg believed
Germany was on the defensive. June 1944 saw first the D-Day landings in France and then a
massive offensive by the Russians. To a professional military mind it was plain that to
continue the war would only cause a phenomenal loss of life and the endangerment of the
German nation itself.

Faced by the barbarity of Hitler's war and its impending failure, von Stauffenberg
decided to act. As he put it: 'I could never look the wives and children of the fallen in
the eye if I did not do something to stop this senseless slaughter.' Now working in
association with a wider group of both military and civilian resisters, he attempted to
assassinate the Führer during a briefing at the military headquarters in eastern Prussia.
Later the same day, while trying to organise a coup in Berlin, he was shot by troops who
had remained loyal to Hitler. Steinbrück and von Stauffenberg had very different
experiences in the Third Reich. What they shared was the frustration of the hopes and
expectations which they had originally invested in it. For both of these individuals,
resistance was born of disillusionment.

Resistance by Necessity

Once Hitler was Chancellor, various of types of people (for example gypsies and
homosexuals) were persecuted with less and less mercy. This was particularly so for German
Jews. In the first two or three years of the Third Reich they were banned from certain
shops, thrown out of various jobs and had German citizenship withdrawn. In November 1938
concerted anti-Semitic violence swept the country in the form of the 'Crystal Night'
pogroms. Thereafter German Jews were stripped of their financial assets. During the war,
as German power stretched across Europe, genocide became the deliberate policy of the
state. Under the circumstances, for a Jew to conform to the demands of the Third Reich
meant at first abuse and imprisonment, later it meant death. So what were they to do?

These people had not expected to be singled out for such vitriolic persecution and they
were not particularly well placed to deal with it. In fact, Germany's Jews comprised less
than 1 per cent of the national population. None the less they managed to band together
quickly to form a large number of self-help organisations. These raised 25 million Reich
Marks to help sustain the poorer members of their community in 1935 alone. Increasingly,
however, it became clear that the only way for German Jews to regain their freedom was to
leave their homeland. Since 80 per cent of German-Jewish families had been established in
Germany for centuries, this was a hard decision to take. It was also in conflict with the
way government policy was developing. For example, the weight of taxation facing would-be
Jewish emigrants was increasing dramatically. In 1934 these people could expect 60 per
cent financial losses; by 1939 the figure was 96 per cent. Even so, 120,000 Jews emigrated
between 1933 and 1937. A further 118,000 left in the wake of 'Crystal Night'. By October
1941 only 164,000 Jews were left in Germany. Of these, 50 per cent were aged over 50
and only 13 per cent under 18. In other words, by the time the Holocaust had begun, the
great majority of Germany's Jews, and the younger ones in particular, had left the
country.

Emigration meant survival. In the context of a state which eventually aimed at
annihilating all of Europe's Jews this was enough to constitute a type of resistance. But
even the Jews who remained in Germany did not always await quietly the most tragic of
fates. When the deportations from Germany began in Autumn 1941, 10-12,000 German Jews went
into hiding. By 1943 5,000 were undercover in Berlin alone, and of these 1,402 survived.
Of course, sometimes they had been helped by German Gentiles, and in 1971 Yad Vashem in
Jerusalem honoured 69 of these kind souls.

As a result of emigration and hiding, by far the majority of Germany's Jews survived
the Third Reich. But the alternatives facing them had always been especially stark: resist
or else face degradation and murder. Their resistance was born of necessity.

Resistance by Principled Choice

Hans Steinbrück, Claus von Stauffenberg and surviving German Jews: all of these people
chose, sooner or later, to resist the course of the Third Reich. Their choices in fact had
a common denominator: they were reactions to specific developments in the world around
them. That is to say, German Jews reacted to rabid persecution; Steinbrück reacted to his
imprisonment; and von Stauffenberg reacted to barbarity and a threat to his country. And
yet there were Germans who (unlike the Jews) could have conformed to the expectations of
the Third Reich and still have survived, but who (unlike Steinbrück and von
Stauffenberg) always chose to do otherwise.

Communists resisted Hitler by virtue of their political principles. In January 1933,
the German Communist Party (KPD) had 300,000 members. With Hitler's seizure of power, they
experienced a truly relentless persecution. In the wake of the Reichstag Fire Decree,
which was based on a supposed Communist threat to the state, 10,000 KPD members were
arrested. 14,000 more were arrested in 1935, 11,678 in 1936, over 8,000 in 1937 and 3,800
in 1938. By 1945 over half of Germany's Communists had been imprisoned or persecuted in
some way. 25,000-30,000 of them had been murdered. To be a Communist in the Third Reich
was clearly a high risk decision, and yet the hopes of many sympathisers remained alive.
For example, the party set up anti-Nazi propaganda presses outside Germany. As a result
1.25 million pro-Communist leaflets were seized while being smuggled into Germany in 1934.
During the next year 1.65 million were seized. Goodness knows how many more must have got
through!

The group of young Communists led by Herbert Baum was, admittedly, a special case.
Since all of its members were Jewish, they faced persecution regardless of their political
beliefs, but still they managed to stage one of the most ambitious anti-Nazi stunts ever
carried out on German soil. In 1942 Joseph Goebbels had opened an anti-Russian exhibition
in Berlin entitled ironically 'The Soviet Paradise'. On 18 May, Baum and some friends
fire-bombed the exhibition. Unfortunately it seems that one of the group was a police
informer and soon they were arrested. Executions followed. Some churchmen resisted by
virtue of their religious principles. Refusing to be subsumed under a pro-Nazi
organisation called 'the German Christians', in Autumn 1933 some 6,000 Protestant
clergymen led by Martin Niemöller set up 'the Confessing Church'. They committed
themselves to preserving the purity of the scriptures as the only guide to true religious
belief. Four years later Niemöller was arrested on Hitler's specific orders. As for the
Catholic Church in Germany, the Vatican was over-hasty to accept the Concordat in July
1933. Some senior members of the Catholic clergy did prevent junior priests speaking out
against Hitler's government. Even so, during the years of the Third Reich, between a third
and a half of all priests were persecuted for placing Christian beliefs ahead of National
Socialist political doctrine. In 1941, for example, Father Lichtenberg was arrested in
Berlin for preaching about the need to extend compassion towards Germany's Jews. He died
in prison two years later.

Individuals rejected the Third Reich because of independent moral principles. Helmuth
von Moltke was a Silesian nobleman and qualified lawyer who worked for the international
legal section of German military intelligence. He had never looked favourably on Hitler's
movement and took every opportunity in government meetings to block measures with which he
disagreed. Letters to his wife show how deeply he was affected when he learned of war-time
atrocities committed by German soldiers against Serbian villagers and by the treatment he
witnessed of Berlin's Jews. He decided to hold a series of secret political meetings on
his family estate at Kreisau in 1942 and 1943. Present were like-minded people drawn from
all social circles: from former-trades union officials to civil servants and military men.
Some of them had contacts with von Stauffenberg. Together they discussed and planned for
the way a broadly democratic German state should be constructed once Hitler was deposed.
Unfortunately, von Moltke's activities were uncovered in early 1944. He was arrested and
later executed.

Equally remarkable were the actions of the 'White Rose Group'. Led by Hans and Sophie
Scholl, this collection of students at Munich University wrote five bitterly anti-Nazi
leaflets during 1942 and 1943 which were distributed around the country. The pamphlets
relied on moral arguments to persuade Germans to embark on passive resistance against the
government and to sabotage the war effort. In one particularly memorable passage, the
group pointed out that crimes without parallel were being carried out against Jews in
Poland. They added that anyone who did not try to prevent them was guilty too.

On 18 February 1943, Hans (aged 24) and Sophie (aged 22) were caught tipping between
1,500 and 1,800 leaflets down the main staircase of Munich University. They were tried by
a People's Court and executed. Munich's ordinary citizens were deeply shocked.

The Communists, churchmen and independent humanitarians discussed here were motivated
by different beliefs. Yet each of these individuals had a core of principles so strong
that it always dictated resistance to the Third Reich.

Conclusion

All of the figures populating this brief essay resisted Hitler. Each one had his or her
own story about the decision to do so. Distinctions between those who took a stand after
becoming disillusioned with the Third Reich, those who acted out of necessity and others
who resisted because of political, religious or moral principles are highlighted. But
whether we want to talk about von Stauffenberg's self-sacrifice, the courageous actions of
the Scholls or the readiness of German Jews to start fresh lives in foreign lands, each
and every one of them deserves the utmost understanding and respect. They are the bright
lights in a dark period of German history.